The "Avoid the Summer Slide" parent handout includes suggestions like:

• A card game with several variations, all of which reinforce number sense, number relationships like “greater than” and “less than”, and addition, subtraction
• Games that help kids develop pattern recognition
• Fun ways to experiment with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional forms
• Critical thinking and problem-solving activities

• Answer a question with a question. Child: “What am I supposed to do here?” Parent: “What do you think you should do here?” or “Is there anything here that will give you help?” When your child is able to answer a question on her own, let her know. “Wow! I’m impressed. Did you know you already knew the answer?” (Note: In DreamBox, we provide different levels of instructions in most games. Click Help once to receive a quick recap of the instructions. Click Help again and you’ll receive more detailed, explicit directions. Teach your child about this feature.)
• Latency – wait for your child to respond. Often we (parents and teachers) start answering our own questions before a child has had an adequate amount of think time. Give your child the think time she needs. If you don’t, your child learns that by waiting a little while, you’ll answer the question and provide more help, whether she needs it or not. When teaching, I taught myself to wait for over a minute for some responses. This feels like an incredible amount of time, but it’s the amount of time that some kids need to consider a problem and respond to it.
• Don’t hover. Are you a “helicopter” parent? Do you swoop in and rescue your child at the first sign of a struggle? If this sounds like you, put some distance between your child and her struggles. I’d also suggest reading one of the books in the Love & Logic series.
• Be present, but not attentive. Some kids are comforted just knowing a helping hand is available. Sit nearby with a book. Eventually walk away for 2 minutes, then 5. Whenever I introduce a new computer game to my daughter, I’m always nearby for the initial experience. As she gets familiar with the game, I decrease my attention and proximity to her.
• Don’t be present. Some kids are willing to experiment more and make mistakes when a parent or sibling isn’t around. Basically, they don’t want to make mistakes in front of anyone. Let them. Provide earphones so you don’t hear every wrong answer.
• Model behavior by sharing your struggles. Let your child know that you have to solve hard problems too. Talk about this. Let her know how good it feels when you’ve finally completed a difficult task through hard work and perseverance. Also, let her know when you almost gave up but didn’t.
• Limit the time spent on one activity. Some kids have a hard time self-regulating how much is too much. They start to break down when an activity has lasted too hard. Stop the activity and refocus your child’s attention.
• Think out loud. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t help your child. Of course you should. Just make sure you’re giving the right kind of help. Try to verbally express what you’re thinking as you help your child. Share even the smallest details. Two fabulous books are this are Comprehending Math: Adapting Reading Strategies to Teach Mathematics, K-6 by Arthur Hyde and Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.

A woman enters the classroom, greets us with a simple “Buongiorno”, and writes her name on the blackboard. She looks unhappy and unfriendly. She announces that she is the math teacher, and that she is going to start immediately by assessing where we are at in our math skills. Her concept of “assessing” is giving us a nasty inquisitive look and stating: “You are assumed to know additions and subtractions and multiplications. If you don’t know, it is a problem because we won’t review these. Now, let’s see: who can’t do division?”

Panic! Everybody is paralyzed in fear. The excitement sinks in every heart. All of a sudden I could swear that looking out the window the sky appears cloudy and gray. Nobody moves. Why would anybody in their right mind denounce themselves as ignorant to this woman on their first day of school? The woman continues “OK, so everybody appears to know how to do division. Very good.” She smiles sarcastically and stares at the list of names on the desk. She lifts up her head and points her finger toward a student in the middle row. “You, in the red shirt. Yes, you! What is your name?” A boy in his new red shiny shirt announces his name with a trembling voice. You can almost hear his thoughts “Darn! I knew this shirt was too bright!” The teacher points at the blackboard and says, “Come here at the board please, and write this division: 132 divided by 15, let’s see how you do.” The rest is a blur. I wasn’t the kid in a red shirt, and I could have probably done that division, but that didn’t matter at all. The only thing that was clear was that math was bad news.

What a great way to teach kids to hate math. Math all of a sudden became cold, dry, and unforgiving. Something to fear; something to be afraid of!

Math Learning Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

That was one of the worst math teachers I ever had. Not because she didn’t know math – she had a degree in it - but because she couldn’t teach it. She just terrorized us with her ways, making us feel like we were always supposed to know something that we didn’t know. I hated math during middle school and I didn’t do too well at it. Only a few kids did. At that time, I would have never believed that a few years later, in high school, I would have passed my math graduation exam with flying colors, achieving the highest possible score in the state exams and that I would have been in love with math so much that I chose a major in Computer Science.

The only difference between middle school and high school was the teacher I had. In high school I found a fantastic teacher. He taught us to see math as a set of tools – “a collection of screwdrivers” as he used to call it - that helps us solve real, practical and material problems of everyday life. He helped me understand the concept of “number” in a way that became a natural way of thinking. It wasn’t an abstruse concept to memorize as-is, a confusing story to repeat when asked by a teacher, a table of faceless relationships between numbers, or a set of rules to apply to pass a test. It came alive. I could see numbers in everyday things, and their relationships and properties were clear and fascinating. Even the most complex parts of the high school curriculum such as limits, integrals, mathematical analysis, complex numbers, and linear programming became a set of practical tools to understand and resolve real world problems.

This teacher made a significant difference in my life, and today I am hoping to use the “set of screwdrivers” he gave me to build programs that help kids master, deeply understand, and love these very fundamental concepts that helped me so much in life.